Oil and gas production is pursuing opportunities in increasingly deeper waters, thus it is desirable to develop solutions that can enable efficient production from deepwater fields. Subsea production and processing systems have been qualified and applied at water depths of up to 2500 meters. However, there are challenges associated with deep water production and processing systems.
For example, deep water production and processing systems should be designed to endure the high pressure of the water columns acting upon them. If the water is too deep, the wall of the equipment may need to be too thick to be manufactured. To address this challenge, the industry has been pursuing compact technologies to reduce the size and wall thickness of the equipment. However, the performance of these compact systems is generally lower when compared to conventional systems and more complicated, which may introduce reliability issues over the long run. Another challenge of greater water depths is the difficulties of system maintenance and intervention. ROVs have limited intervention capability and the whole production and processing system may need to be retrieved for a thorough intervention, which can be cost prohibitive at greater water depths.
As such, there exists a desire to address the aforementioned problems and issues. Therefore, what is desired is a means to apply current qualified production and processing systems and technologies to greater water depths. The systems proposed will, advantageously, also be easier to maintain compared to conventional systems.